Yesterday we celebrated Memorial Day Weekend by camping out overnight at Three Rooker Bar, a large shifting sandbar that is a favorite spot of local boaters and anglers. The southern tip of the sandbar separated from the main part sometime during the winter, and has become the power boater’s #1 hotspot because it has relatively deep water to within an easy cooler-carrying distance of shore. I have named it Fiberglass Island.

The sail boaters use the northern tip. Snobs.

But I digress. We went to the southern tip of the main island, across a wadable channel from Fiberglass Island, and set up our ginormous tent, copper fire pit, mini-Weber grill, coolers, folding tables and chairs, etc. We had so much stuff we had to load it into a john boat and tow it behind us. Ahhhh, roughing it. Sad to say it was too windy for the candelabras. It was absolutely beautiful, and by about 7:00 PM, we literally had the whole island to ourselves. The moon was shining bright, the stars were out, and the wind was brisk enough to keep the mosquitoes away.

And the fish were biting. I caught a nice sea trout, and my son Noel caught his first snook, pictured above, a 27” big mamma snook. He was beyond thrilled. The snook took his bait at the stroke of midnight, and the sight of his glow-in-the-dark bobber zipping away from him at warp speed had him screaming. A miracle – none of the tackle broke, and we got the snook up onto the beach for this picture. Oh yeah, and he caught his own bait with his cast net.

Paradise.

The return trip saw The Happy Carpenter make quite the faux pas with the john boat and a channel marker, but the less said about that the better.

This is for you, Ken. Hope it makes you feel a little better. The rest of you will enjoy reading this, too. It's a compilation of good news from Iraq. Just click here. You know, I'm starting to think this Iraq thing is really going to work. At times, especially around the Month of Fallujah, I was having the feeling that the Iraqi people just weren’t worth it. After reading most of the good news link above, my optimism is returning. There apparently are lots of good and decent Iraqis, and it looks like they are coming forward with bravery.

At a party last night, to which, alas, the Tampa Bay Lightning did not show up, some of us started talking about the war, or more specifically, about the news coverage of the war. I almost never watch the mainstream media -- I either can't take it or don't want to waste my time or both -- but I am interested in the media as a political force. So when I'm in a group that starts talking about the media or about their perceptions of important (to me) stories, my ears perk up. According to my mostly apolitical friends, the media's feeding frenzy on the Abu Ghraib (sic) prison story has reached the point of absurdity. These people are not that critical of media news. It's not that they don't think about what they see/hear/read; I mean they don't usually think about the media as such. Water to a fish, you know. But the prison story has been drummed so hard they have gone from outrage against the Army, to outrage against the President (as the media intended), to boredom, to outrage against the media, to strong support for the Army and the President.

Personally, I find it strange that Media has overplayed its hand so badly, so blatantly. I guess the people running it, the TV producers, the newspaper editors, etc., are smart folks. They have enough sense to bury coverage, for instance, of Al Gore ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth because they're well aware that coverage of events like that would hurt their cause. Or to bury comments by Senator Kerry who, when told of the President falling off his bike, said something to the effect of "What? Did his training wheels fall off?"

But when it comes to Abu Ghraib, they just go nuts. They have lost the bubble, or at least they've lost my friends. Most of my friends have reacted by losing respect for the Media’s objectivity and turning it off. They’ve developed a stubborn kind of resistance to the media. Even when they agree with the position of the Media, they are beginning to struggle against having things shoved done their throat.
And that is good news.

1. The cultural paradigm of expression and neocapitalist objectivism
"Sexual identity is a legal fiction," says Baudrillard; however, according to Finnis[1] , it is not so much sexual identity that is a legal fiction, but rather the fatal flaw, and eventually the paradigm, of sexual identity. Baudrillard's critique of neocapitalist objectivism holds that the law is capable of intentionality.

In a sense, Foucault uses the term 'expressionism' to denote the role of the writer as participant. The primary theme of Hubbard's[2] analysis of structuralist postconceptual theory is the economy, and subsequent absurdity, of cultural class.

Therefore, Debord uses the term 'neocapitalist objectivism' to denote a subdialectic paradox. The subject is contextualised into a expressionism that includes art as a totality. In a sense, if deconstructivist narrative holds, the works of Tarantino are not postmodern. The premise of neocapitalist objectivism suggests that culture is intrinsically dead.
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http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Something happened yesterday… After we got home from the dance recital, the kinder were all fired up about using the camcorder. So the next day my son was video taping everything, including my eldest daughter on an all-out bitch brat rant at my littlest girl. You should have seen eldest’s face when she saw the tape played back. She was shocked at how ugly she looked and sounded. She was ashamed. But she really took it to heart. I could see it in her eyes that she was resolving to be better. She said that now she knew why we hated it so much when she acted like that.
Next stop, pouty-boy.

Q: What should you do if you see your ex-husband rolling around in
pain on the ground?
A: Shoot him again.

Q: How can you tell when a man is well hung?
A: When you can just barely slip your finger in between his neck and the
noose.

Q: Why do little boys whine?
A: They are practicing to be men.

Q: How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 1-he just holds it up there and waits for the world to revolve around
him. OR 3- one to screw in the bulb, and two to listen to him brag
about the
screwing part.

Q: What do you call a handcuffed man?
A: Trustworthy.

Q: What does it mean when a man is in your bed gasping for breath and
calling your name?
A: You did not hold the pillow down long enough.

Q: Why does it take 100,000,000 sperm to fertilize one egg?
A: Because not one will stop and ask directions.

Q: Why do female black widow spiders kill their males after mating?
A: To stop the snoring before it starts.

Q: Why do men whistle when they are sitting on the toilet?
A: It helps them remember which end they need to wipe.

Q: What is the difference between men and women?
A: A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need. A man wants every
Woman to satisfy his one need.

Last night was the first dance recital for two of my girls, Renee & The Happy Wife.
Renee did ballet, hula, and belly dancing.
The Happy Wife did hula, Tahitian, and Belly.
And what a belly!
The whole show was priceless. If there is anything cuter than little girls dancing in cute little costumes, I have yet to see it.
The big girls were great, too.
Their instructor, Miss Donna, used to be a professional belly dancer at Bush Gardens, and really knows her stuff. It shows in the quality of her class.
Next year The Happy Wife is going to spring for the giant Tahitian headdress so she can be in more of the program, and my eldest has said she wants to do it too. That makes me happy, 'cause she was really good when she was little. Good enough that her instructor moved her up to be the littlest in a class of older girls, but she was still suffering from asthma in those days, missed too many classes, fell behind, and came to hate it. I hope she does join the other girls next year.
Guys, you gotta get your wives into hula. It makes them happy. And if you can talk them into belly dancing, too, well then! Va Va VA VOOM!

Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering. The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.
--from a report in the Independent (link courtesty of Instapundit)
Because the media are objective and the international community is unwaveringly moral, I know this story will be met with international outrage and round-the-clock media coverage that will far exceed the attention given to the comparatively trifling abuses of Abu Ghraib prison. Weeks of headline coverage must surely follow. Morning after morning, Katy Couric will tirelessly focus her interviews on some facet of the scandal. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will feel compelled to appear on African television networks and apologize for the transgressions.

I mean, the international community isn’t just dogmatically anti-American, is it? The media aren’t just reflexively anti-US military and anti-Bush, right? Next year, the Cannes film festival will swoon for Michael Moore’s documentary of recent UN hypocrisy, corruption, and lethal failures, don’t you think?

Surely this story will get the same extensive frontpage coverage as UN embezzling and bribery in the Iraq oil-for-food program. Oh, wait. That story was largely ignored, wasn't it? Well, I’m sure the decision to scrutinize any allegations of US misconduct in Iraq and ignore UN abuse in Iraq and elsewhere was just an honorable matter of honorably set priorities in the ever-honorable pursuit of news. Just like Ted Koppel’s lack of interest in the latest UN abuse story will be.

“For Brutus is an honorable, man; so are they all, all honorable men,” says Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, speaking of the senators who murdered a defenseless Julius Caesar, who had gone to the senate believing that Brutus was his friend.

A one year totally free membership to The Happy Carpenter fanclub for the best caption to this picture of former Vice President and former Presidential Candidate Al Gore.
After reading some of his remarks where I got this picture, I was thinking:
After four years of this guy,
we'd all be begging for Howard Dean.
YEEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!

Some ideas to get the ball rolling...

Geez, Doc! Think you coulda got that scapula any colder?

or

I am the best guy who ever graduated from this dang high school, and I'll hang out in the parking lot for as many years as I want to! And the new letter sweaters don't look as good as the old ones.

This year's William & Mary commencement speech, by honorary doctorate John Stewart. A few sips:

Thank you Mr. President, I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are. Thank you.

My best to the choir. I have to say, that song never grows old for me. Whenever I hear that song, it reminds me of nothing. ...

I know there were some parents that were concerned about my speech here tonight, and I want to assure you that you will not hear any language that is not common at, say, a dock workers union meeting, or Tourrett’s convention, or profanity seminar. Rest assured. ...

But today isn’t about how my presence here devalues this fine institution. It is about you, the graduates. I’m honored to be here to congratulate you today. Today is the day you enter into the real world, and I should give you a few pointers on what it is. It’s actually not that different from the environment here. The biggest difference is you will now be paying for things, and the real world is not surrounded by three-foot brick wall. And the real world is not a restoration. If you see people in the real world making bricks out of straw and water, those people are not colonial re-enactors—they are poor. Help them. And in the real world, there is not as much candle lighting. I don’t really know what it is about this campus and candle lighting, but I wish it would stop. We only have so much wax, people. ...

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. ...

I came to William and Mary because as a Jewish person I wanted to explore the rich tapestry of Judaica that is Southern Virginia. Imagine my surprise when I realized “The Tribe” was not what I thought it meant.
...
College is something you complete. Life is something you experience. So don’t worry about your grade, or the results or success. Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency which I imagine, after going through the program here, is quite strong…although I’m sure downloading illegal files…but, nah, that’s a different story.

Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may.

The former Secretary of the Navy and current member of the Kean Commission investigating the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States (center) addressed the U.S. Naval Institute 130th Annual Meeting and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on 31 March. Following is an edited version of his remarks.

We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better. This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, "We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg." Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared. Let's not kid ourselves. Some very smart people defeated every single defense this country had, and defeated them easily, with confidence and arrogance. There are many lessons we must learn from this.

We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war.
This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism. None of our government institutions was set up with receptors, or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely vulnerable to a concerted attack.

Where are we today? I'd like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven't. We have very real vulnerabilities. We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy. We are fighting them in many areas of the world, and I must say with much better awareness of the issues and their nature. We're fighting with better tools. But I cannot say we are now safe from the kind of attack we saw on 9/11. I think we are much safer than we were on 9/11; the ability of our enemies to launch a concerted, sophisticated attack is much less than it was then. Still, we're totally vulnerable to the kinds of attacks we've seen in Madrid, for instance. We face a very sophisticated and intelligent enemy who has been trained, in many cases, in our universities and gone to school on our methods, learned from their mistakes, and continued to use the very nature of our free society and its aversion to intrusion in privacy and discrimination to their benefit.

For example, today it is still a prohibited offense for an airline to have two people of the same ethnic background interviewed at one time, because that is discrimination. Our airline security is still full of holes. Our ability to carry out covert operations abroad is only marginally better than it was at the time of 9/11. A huge amount of fundamental cultural and institutional change must be carried out in the United States before we can effectively deal with the nature of the threat. Today, probably 50 or more states have schools that are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training. We have absolutely no successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts.

It's very important that people understand the complexity of this threat. We have had to institute new approaches to protecting our civil liberties—the way we authorize surveillance, the way we conduct our immigration and naturalization policies, and the way we issue passports. That's only the beginning. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize the problem, to recognize that for every jihadist we kill or capture—as we carry out an aggressive and positive policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere—another 50 are being trained in schools and mosques around the world.

This problem goes back a long way. We have been asleep. Just by chance about six months ago, I picked up a book by V. S. Naipaul, one of the great English prose writers. I love to read his short stories and travelogues. The book was titled Among the Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982) and was an account of his travels in Indonesia, where he found that Saudi-funded schools and mosques were transforming Indonesian society from a very relaxed, syncretist Islam to a jihadist fundamentalist fanatical society, all paid for with Saudi Arabian funding. Nobody paid attention. Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.

We have seen throughout the last 20 years a kind of head-in-the-sand approach to national security in the Pentagon. We were comfortable with the existing concept of what the threat was, what threat analysis was, and how we derived our requirements, still using the same old tools we all grew up with. We paid no attention to the real nature of this emerging threat, even though there were warning signs. Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut—241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted United States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when attacked; and they don't even bother to take their dead with them. This was a seminal moment for Osama.

After that, we had our CIA station chief kidnapped and tortured to death. Nothing was done. Then, we had our Marine Colonel [William R.] Higgins kidnapped and publicly hanged. Nothing was done. We fueled and made these people aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism as a tool of jihad. It worked. They chased us out of one place after another, because we would not retaliate.

The Secretary of Defense at the time has said he never received those intercepts. That's an example of one of the huge problems our commission has uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence community to evolve into a bureaucratic archipelago of baronies in the Defense Department, the CIA, and 95 other different intelligence units in our government. None of them talked to one another in the same computerized system. There was no systemic sharing. Some will recall the Phoenix memo and the fact that there were people in the FBI saying, "Hey, there are young Arabs learning to fly and they don't want to learn how to take off or land. Maybe we should look into them." It went nowhere.

We had watch lists with 65,000 terrorists' names on them, created by a very sophisticated system in the State Department called Tip-Off. That existed before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] bothered to look at it. The FAA had 12 names on its no-fly list. The State Department had a guy on its list named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was already under indictment for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The State Department issued him a visa. I could go on and on.

Two big lessons glare out from what our investigations have discovered so far. Number one, in our government bureaucracy today there is no accountability. Since 9/11—the greatest failure of American defenses in the history of our country, at least since the burning of Washington in 1814—only one person has been fired. He is a hero, in my judgment: [retired Vice] Admiral John Poindexter. He got fired because of an excessive zeal to catch these bastards. But he was the only one fired. Not any of the 19 officers lost their jobs at Immigration for allowing the 19 terrorists—9 who presented grossly falsified passports—to enter the country. One Customs Service officer stopped the 20th terrorist, at risk to his own career. Do you think he's been promoted?

Not a chance. That is the culture we've allowed to develop, except in the Navy. We've all felt the pain over the last year of the number of skippers who have been relieved in the U.S. Navy: two on one cruiser in one year. That's a problem for us. It's also something we should be mightily proud of, because it stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S. government. In the United States Navy, we still have accountability. It's bred into our culture. And what we stand for here has to be respread into our government and our nation.

Actions have consequences, and people must be held accountable. Customs officer Jose Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was supposed to be on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Probably because of the shorthanded muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists. Melendez-Perez did this at great personal risk, because his colleagues and his supervisors told him, "You can't do this. This guy is an Arab ethnic. You're racially profiling. You're going to get in real trouble, because it's against Department of Transportation policy to racially profile." He said, "I don't care. This guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes." As he sent this guy back out of the United States, the guy turned around to him and said, "I'll be back." You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We captured him in Afghanistan. Do you think Melendez-Perez got a promotion? Do you think he got any recognition? Do you think he is doing any better than the 19 of his time-serving, unaccountable colleagues? Don't think any bit of it. We have no accountability, but we're going to restore it.

The other glaring lack that has been discovered throughout the investigation is in leadership. Leadership is the willingness to accept the burdens and the risks, the potential embarrassment, and the occasional failure of leading men and women. It is saying: We will do it this way. I won't let that guy in. I will do this and I'll take the consequences. That's what we stand for here. That's what the crucible of the U.S. Naval Academy has carried on now since 1845, and what the U.S. Naval Institute has carried on for 130 years and hasn't compromised. We all should be very proud of it. We need leadership now more than ever. We need to respread this culture, which is so rare today, into the way we conduct our government business, let alone our private business.

Having said all this, I'm very optimistic. We have seen come forward in this investigation people from every part of our bureaucracy to say they screwed up and to tell what went wrong and what we've got to do to change it. We have an agenda for change. I think we're going to see a very fundamental shift in the culture of our government as a result of this. I certainly hope so.

This should be a true wake-up call. We cannot let this be swept under the rug, put on the shelf like one more of the hundreds of other commissions that have gone right into the memory hole. This time, I truly believe it's going to be different. (emphasis added)

It's hard to disagree with a thing he says, except the conclusion. I don't see much reason to hope for a fundamental shift in the culture of our government. It certainly hasn't happened yet. Until the current Secretary of Transportation is ridden out of town on a rail, covered with tar and feathers, you'll know it's business as usual in Washington. Perhaps after the next 9-11, we'll really, really mean it. I guess I should wait and see if any meaningful action is taken after the 9-11 Commission's report, but I am skeptical to say the least.
But Senator Kerry would be much worse. Bad enough our own bureaucratic baronies without inviting the UN and Brussels into the mix.

Seen at low tide

HummingbirdFinally, my first hummingbirds. Saw them on a fire bush in Crystal Beach, FL. My rental's neighbor's yard is all xeriscaped, which is ugly to me but just fine with the little hummers. At first, I thought they were the biggest hornets I'd ever seen.

Flamingo!One of these dudes flew right over my house. I couldn't believe it. And please don't tell me it was a roseated spoonbill because it was a frickin' flamingo, dude! Huge and pink and right there above me. I was like so freaking out, you know?

Black SkimmerThese beauties are getting scarce, but one flew by yesterday at low tide on the hunt for minnows.

Dead sea turtlecool, but smelly

Reddish EgretThese have been hanging out around the pool quite a bit lately. Must be a new group of adolesent birds -- the youngsters like to hunt where the water is clear, and it takes them a day to figure out there are not now and never will be fish in the swimming pool no matter how clear the water.

Sand Piper

Brown PelicanI saw a flock of about 200 of these at Disappearing Island yesterday, just south of Anclote Island on the west coast of FL. Good to see such a large flock.

Wood PeckerThey've developed a sudden interest in the orange tree, which just went into bloom.